Tag Archives: AI

Could AI end the reign of the desk with monitors?

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There is a lot of talk right now about how AI is dramatically going to reshape the workforce – from less jobs altogether, to no graduate roles, to the death of coding and everything in between.  There is a lot less written about how AI will impact the workplace itself – beyond the possibility of smaller workplaces for smaller workforces.  To me, the potential for AI to reshape workplaces are much more interesting than just size.

First and foremost, workplaces should be places that respond to the process of the work being done within them (sadly not always true today). So how will AI change the process of work?  Does it change the nature of our organisations or teams?  Does it change how and what we use our computer for?  Will it mean more meetings or less? Will we be meeting with humans or with AI agents?  These are all questions to which we don’t really have solid answers yet.

Its likely that the technology changes will come faster than the human changes keep pace.  For quite some time – the possibilities of what technology can deliver has been ahead of how humans want to live and work (think self driving cars or even how limited video calls were before covid). The more radical futures of AI – such as total organisational structural overhaul with everyone working as contractors assigned projects by AI systems –  to me therefore seem an unlikely near term reality.  In fact this contract / gig economy has been predicated for 20 odd years but has never really come to pass (this one from 2013 is worth a look).  It’s not because the tech doesn’t exist to support it, but because for many individuals and organisatons alike – the security and predictability of the current corporate stable salaried models and ongoing teams has continued to be the preferred way of working.

Whilst the nature of work itself might change, it would therefore seem unlikely that the structural organsiation of the corporate world would change significantly anytime soon.  This is not surprising.  COVID proved that we don’t need workplaces to work but the majority of companies still have them, and in many cases, still have something very similar to what they had before COVID  – it is often just used less and slightly differently.  To me this suggests that the idea of what we call ‘workplace’ will continue to exist in an AI world – even if its purpose and the way it is used continues to evolve.

Different headcount growth and AI uptake scenarios are linked to differing potential outcomes for the size and quality of the workplace.  Anthony Slumbers has written a great post envisioning different scenarios based upon high level impacts of AI here. Anthony talks at high level about more desks or more client space – but how does that really translate to workplace stragegy and design?

I’d like to think that AI adoption might free us from the very strong ties to the ergonomic desk and monitor, which the laptop has still not broken. One issue with the desk + monitor is that this is the most single use / inflexible unit of space our workplaces contain today.  1 person equals 1 desk + monitor (or more monitors).  Whilst occupancy fluctuates day to day, the desks sit empty.  But we have to have enough just in case.  Heaven forbid someone comes in and can’t find a desk with a monitor – they might never return.  These desks with monitors then end up taking up more space than they deserve based upon their use patterns.  According to XY Sense data “Up to 31% of desks are never used on a given day, while 21% are used for less than one hour [a day]”  This fits with what I see in our own observation studies.

It’s hard to use a desk with a monitor for much else than single use work (and often not focus work either). Real collaboration between more than 2 people is blocked by monitors, and often even paired collaboration is distracting to neighbours.  However, small rooms or desks without monitors get used even less often that the desks with monitors.

What if AI means we no longer need a monitor?  What if it means we spend less time looking at screens?  Alternatively what if it means we need more and even bigger screens?

Technologies for projecting onto surface have existing for a long time.  The limitations have been about what they can project onto and how we can interact with them.  What if you could project onto any surface and it could become a touch based interface?  Laser based projection keyboards have been around for awhile and are already available for under $100 on Amazon.  I think the reason they don’t have a high takeup is for many the tactile nature of keyboards helps to touch type, otherwise you might as well just use your phone keyboard.  There is even a paint that promises to be a surface suited to an interactive projection screen! The solution to more larger displays might not be the size of a desk but the size of a room.

With AI we might not even need to ever touch these projections.  Voice assistants are taking over. This adds another dimension to how we consider the future workplace.  If we are all talking to our AI agents all day, how will the open plan office work?  Will we all be working in the atmosphere of a call centre?  This leads to the question – will AI replace focus work as we know it today?  Or will it replace what we term ‘interruptible work’, the tasks like some email and scheduling meetings where it doesn’t matter if you colleagues are chatting around you.  Likely it will be replacing some of both types of work, with supervising our AI agents becoming a more significant task.

If we spend less time focusing and less time on interruptible work – will we therefore spend more time collaborating?  With humans or with AI systems?  Or both?  Already today, both seems to be emerging as the answer.  AI supports us in our meetings and is likely to become a more active collaborator in future. But will this mean more meeting rooms?

Already we find in many organisations that 90% of meetings are for 3 people or less (published from XY Sense is 94% are 6 or less people), with many knoweledge workers already in back to back meetings all day.  Perhaps we won’t need more rooms (although most workplaces today still don’t have enough). We will need rooms designed to suit these new ‘hybrid’ human AI collaborations where voice activated systems and large displays allow human participants to interact with the AI – either in person or virtually.  Perhaps our virtual colleagues will arrive as holograms (again already possible, this Microsoft demo is six years old).  In all likelihood this means flexible ‘loose tech’ spaces where technology and furniture can change to suit different types of interactions.

We probably won’t really want to go for lunch or a drink with our holographic friends though. So perhaps the most important things will remain spaces that humans want to inhabit – natural light, plants, variety and control of the environment is what people tend to actually want -and use.

A number of conversations I’ve had on this topic have lead me to MIT,s famous building 20 (which I have mentioned here before). A space that is flexible and hackable, with private spaces to focus or meet, and opportunities for incidental connection. What stands out most to me always in the stories of this building, is not just the physical, but the sense of community and the purpose. All of these are things which the places we work today and in the future should aspire to – regardless of if they are offices, co-working spaces or cafes.

Meantime, what if all those open plan desks were no longer required?  What would you repurpose the space to?  I don’t think just filling it with a variety of ‘collaborative’ lounges will be the answer.  Don’t despair of the open plan office just yet though – co-pilot tells me we might need ever larger desks with more and more monitors…

Ceilidh Higgins

Image via ChatGPT

Collaboration, Innovation and Connection: Unpacking the Buzzwords of Work

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What does collaboration really mean? Should we think move about connection before collaboration? Don’t worry serendipity hasn’t died yet either. Does your organisation actually want innovation anyway?

These were some of the questions discussing “Driving Collaboration, innovation and connection in the workplace” last week , as I joined Angela Sampson (HASSELL) and Clarissa Lundy (Gensler) on a panel at Sydney Build Expo.

Angela did a fantastic job moderating deftly bringing her own experiences to the discussion all while asking the challenging questions. Clarissa (who was making her panel debut) brought her own perspectives as an amazing workplace designer along with some research from Gensler.

Collaboration is such an overused term in workplace today, it’s almost become a fetish. All over the internet and in every workplace I hear about how we need to collaborate more. But very infrequently do we discuss what this actually means. I have found the term is used very differently in different contexts, organisations and job types. Here I like to draw on the work of Dr Agustin Chevez. Dr Gus talks about collaboration as being one of the many ways we work together – and that we also need to think about cooperation, coordination, delegation, negotiation and socialisation (I like to call them the ‘tions’ of work). To this list I would add connection. Often when people talk about improving collaboration across an organisation connection, is actually what they are referring too. We can’t collaborate, or cooperate, coordinate, delegate,  negotiate or socialise, until we are connected.

These different ways of working together require different types of space. Clarissa and I both talked about how important it is to match the types of spaces to the organisation and the type of work. Small details like the type of furniture and its height can really start to matter.  Large round “collaboration” lounges next to workstations won’t work for most of these ty[pes of collaborating.  Details like the height or shape of a table, the positioning of a touchdown desk will impact how, why and what it gets used for.

The spaces between are important too. The main circulation routes are often where serendipitous interactions which support cross organisation connections occur.  One of the great stories I shared is our own CBRE Sydney workplace which was refurbished just last year. We made a bold decision to relocate the existing stair – out of reception to the back of the building behind the scenes. If was a choice that was debated – it certainly had time and cost implications, and also means there is no showpiece stair in the client space. The reason to move it – was to create better connection between the teams themselves and the employee social hub (as well as stop the stair taking up the best views!). There are also spaces around the stair one can pull away for a chat when you run into a colleague. Two months after we have moved in, the amount of people I see using the stairs suggests it is working!

All the stairs in the world won’t build true connection tho. We need to know each other before we stop to chat on the stairs. Connection and creating a genuine sense of community are essential for true collaboration. If we are burnt out, stressed out and disconnected we won’t bring our best collaborative selves to work. Workplaces and precincts can support this through genuine community building  –  this won’t only come through spaces to, socialise and collaborate but needs to be supported by culture and operations. People need to feel they have the time and permission to participate in events and socialise – to use those alternative types of space.

One important point to remember in all of this is that all of our work in not collaboration. A lack of space to focus and noise are the biggest sources of employee dissatisfaction today Perhaps it is productivity and incremental improvement that is more important than innovation. A quick question of the audience “whose organisation wants them to be innovative?” showed very few hands up – even among what was a largely design oriented crowd! Few organisations today really define productivity or innovation well – so it is hard to measure how well our workplaces might be supporting this. It’s clear however they are not supporting focus work well. It still is true that our workspace can help us to connect, collaborate and innovate – I really should have mentioned the famous building 20 at MIT – which you can read more about here. However in the case of building 20 – it was about user centred design more than anything deliberate!

We also talked about what collaboration might mean in the future, AI is already becoming a team mate and collaborator, robots will start to become more common in workplaces too (and in fact we saw a drinks delivery robot at the bar afterwards).  The future of AI as a collaborator could have a big impact on how we work and the spaces and technologies we need to support more voice activated work or holograms.

Finally I loved that Angela brought up the humble desk. Do we still need them and in fact do we need diversity at all if we sit at our screens more than ever? Whilst there were some disagreements amongst the panel over how necessary desks might be today and into the future – one thing we all agreed upon was that diversity of different qualities of spaces – different light, sound qualities, different types of furnishings – are beneficial particularly to those who are neuro-diverse and more sensitive to noise and sound, but in fact to us all. Universal design means better space for everyone, and natural light or plants can help stimulate our brains and make us feel better – even if we are on a teams call.

Thanks to Sydney Build, Angela and Clarissa as well as everyone who joined us on the day. It was a great conversation to spark a lot more thinking about Connection, Collaboration and Innovation for us all.

Ceilidh Higgins